Our Chief Information Office, Ray Walker sent me an article in The Chronicle: Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives. It’s a great read to gauge the current state of the corporate LMS leviathan.
One passage in particular percolated my sense of irony. In addressing the idea that institutions may have more flexibility to innovate with open source solutions, Michael Chasen…
…argued that there are benefits to the corporate model of software publishing, too. “I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services,” he said. “I don’t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai. Maybe there are. I have a multimillion-dollar hardware-testing lab just to test scalability.”
“At a minimum,” he said, “we are at least just as innovative as open source.”
At least as innovative as open source! With millions in expenditures on hardware and developers Bb is proud of the fact that they are at least as innovative as open source, which runs on the power of volunteers and sheer passion? Chasen’s statement can be read both ways, confirming what I’ve believed for the past two years: that free, oss platforms such as Moodle etc. are now on par with Bb and the other Big Boys, and thus a monumentally better deal for educational institutions. Instead of investing money in licensing, invest that money in people, and shape the direction of the LMS in ways that are best-suited to your institution’s needs.
Chasen poo-poo’s the evidence that institutions are leaving Bb for Moodle, yet his self-assured statement on the matter reveals a flaw in his logic: “There’s not more people leaving now than there were yesterday.” If I have 10 people on Bb on Monday and 1 person leaves, I have 9 on Tuesday. If 1 person then leaves (same count of attrition), that’s down to 8 I have on Wednesday. There may not be an increase in the number of people leaving now than there were yesterday, but the conversion rate is still being whittled away. To exacerbate this fact, I don’t see herds of institutions stampeding towards adopting Bb for the first time (Q4 2009 call reports new higher ed customer increase at about 5%).
Blackboard insists that it’s patent claims will not be asserted against open source software LMS development, but if they really are as shark-like as the Chronicle suggests, what other plans might Chasen et al have to deal with the growing “threat” of Moodle and other oss platforms to their marketshare? The recent Bb partnership with Sakai to develop an open source integration tool may provide some insight. Michael Feldstein highlighted this excerpt from the August 6, 2008 Bb earnings conference call wherein Chasen reported,
our learning system will be able to load other course management system courses through our interface. …a lot of campuses have standardized on the Blackboard system… but there maybe an individual teacher or a very small department that is using either a home-grown system or maybe an open-source solution…
It sounds to me as if a developing Bb strategy is to partner with or leverage open source projects to produce integration or transmogrification tools in order to sweep dissident teachers and courses into Bb.
Thinking about Bb’s modus operandi, the patent debacle, and of course the cost of licenses has already conjured some new, bitter slogans to post on John Krutsch’s >Blackboard Customer-ized Mug Maker. It looks like a great place to vent for disgruntled Bb users; let’s just hope he doesn’t receive his own cease and desist notification.